Judgment day looms for Donald Trump in New York

Donald Trump, who built a mystique as the brash epitome of power, has never been more powerless to dictate his own fate.

His reputation, future, and even perhaps the White House’s destiny, will on Wednesday be placed in the hands of 12 citizens of his native New York City, proving that not even once-and-possibly future commanders in chief are above the law. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Seven men and five women jurors will retire for deliberations on Trump’s six-week hush money trial after Judge Juan Merchan instructs them on the law and their duties. No jury in American history has faced such a task — deciding whether a former president and presumptive major party nominee will be convicted of a crime. And while the jury, which can deliberate for as long as it needs, is bound to decide its verdict on 34 felony charges on the testimony and evidence in the case alone, its decision will reverberate across the nation and the world at a critical moment of the 2024 presidential election.

The trial slogged toward its end on Tuesday in nearly 10 hours of closing arguments that burst into open hostility between rival lawyers.

“You have to put aside the distractions, the press, the politics, the noise. Focus on the evidence and the logical inference that can be drawn from that evidence,” prosecution lawyer Joshua Steinglass told the jury.

“In the interest of justice and in the name of the people of the state of the New York, I ask you to find the defendant guilty. Thank you.”

Prosecutors accused the ex-president of “a conspiracy and a cover-up” and of betraying 2016 voters by illegally falsifying financial records to hide a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the election. Trump denies having an affair with Daniels and has pleaded not guilty in this first of four looming criminal cases — which may be the only one to go to trial before November’s election. In order to convict Trump, jurors must first decide that he falsified financial documents and did so with the express purpose of committing another crime. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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